using a term wrong
It's not like I said black when I meant white. It was used as a loose adjective. The irony is that the term was used to point out rigid pedantic-ness and that's exactly the style of argument against the usage.
It wasn't meant to be used as a synonym for inflexible. It was meaning to imply a range of things - rigid, petty, obsessive, and unable to let-it-go, just like this whole conversation.
This is the same style of conversation every time the metric system vs imperial comes up, or UTC time zones, or daylights savings time, or does the terms "anti-hero" make sense or not. It's this twitchy, Vulcan logic bullshit masquerading as cleverness that has this incredible discomfort with man being an irrational, emotional, analogue being in an increasingly digital world.
And it comes in all forms. Genre discussions, the perpetually offended looking at word walls looking for that one term to tear the whole thing down with, grammar and spelling nazis. OMG SOMETHING DIDN'T FIT IN THE RIGHT BOX.
Using "autistic" as a synonym for "inflexible" is about as valid as saying "night" when you mean "rain"—there's a difference between "not being literal" and "not using any recognizable meaning of the word".
No it's not. When an autistic child needs all their toys lined up a certain way, when you need your routine to be a certain way, when you find social interaction (fluid, organic) difficult but seem to thrive in more STEM based fields, it's a perfectly well fitting term.
No one, including everyone offended at me, had any problem deducing what I meant.